Brian’s Corner: My Most Productive Week Yet
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Hey everyone! I was inspired by other “teen innovators” I have connections with and thought that it would be a great idea to start sharing occasional updates on what I’ve been able to do recently, we’ll see if this turns into a “weekly update” or a “monthly update”. As you may have noticed from the title, this past week (the week of Thanksgiving and Black Friday) has been my most productive week yet!
The Philosophy of Numbers
I took some time so I could really enjoy the beauty of Calculus — which sounds strange, I know. In the classroom, or at least in my math class for this year, it certainly feels like I am just given formulas and told to then go and solve problems, mostly due to the speed of the class in trying to cover everything. Taking time to understand why the relationships and patterns work the way they do, working with abstract problems to understand the rate of a transformation over a miniscule region — that’s what sparks my curiosity and allows me to learn and grow my mind — is really mind-blowing when you get to explore it for yourself. “There’s something so profound about the philosophy of numbers”, as Sal Khan put it, especially with concepts like Calculus that avoid paradoxes, allow us to work in higher orders, and work with functions and relations on the molecular level.
To that end, I was a user tester for Myntor.io, a web application developed by recent UC Berkeley graduates which uses AI to generate an unlimited amount of AP Calculus practice questions. One of the co-founders told me his reasoning behind starting Myntor.io: “I just really want to help people get the basics down so you can quickly move on to solve real-world problems”, citing examples of noise cancellation, blood volume and viscosity in heart surgery, self-driving technology, and of course, COVID-19.
Now it may sound contradictory for me to agree with 1) that it’s great to take a “step back” to appreciate the patterns behind mathematics and 2) that you should get the fundamentals out of the way as soon as possible to start solving real-world problems, when in fact, these two ideas go together. In order to truly understand something, you have to play around with it, experiment with numbers, patterns, graphs, relations, functions — bring them all together — and discover it for yourself. Only then when your curiosity has been unlocked will you learn, grow, and be able to master all the material quickly so you can bring your skills “to market” (out into the real world) as quickly as possible.
COVID-19 Contagion Modeling
Using a type of modeling called Agent-Based Modeling, I created COVID-19 Contagion Models to analyze how quickly the disease could spread through a population. The basic explanation is, I started with a population that was not infected, then a few dots on the map would change color until the entire map was infected. Different parameters such as infection rate, recovery rate, positive infection rate, and death rate can be added in and adjusted for further analysis. More information & explanation to come in a future post!
Planning for the TeenTechSF Global Youth Summit
The TeenTechSF Global Youth Summit 2020 is bringing together tech and health leaders from around the world with the theme: “Tech & Health: Understand More, Fear Less”, featuring a UC Berkeley Microbiologist working on #CRISPR #GeneEditing during COVID-19 as the keynote speaker, international video messages, live panels from TeenTechSF Civic Hackathon 2020 “COVID+COMMUNITY” finalists, and #CSforGood breakout workshops in our partnership with the #HourofCode Global Initiative. Workshops include Introduction to Machine Learning with Make School, COVID-19 Data Analysis with Python, a 3D printing demo from Kuriosity Robotics, a team of teens from Palo Alto 3D printing face shields for hospitals & frontline workers, and more!
REGISTER NOW: 2020-ttsf-global-youth-summit.eventbrite.com
So, a large part of my break was spent meeting with members of the team and outside speakers, coordinating outreach, and bringing everything together for the final two weeks before the summit! Then, there’s our initiative we’re starting to bring even more 3D-printed face shields and masks to front-line workers that we’re coordinating with our partners.
Books and Talks
Of course, no great week is complete without a few books to read or talks to listen to! Here are a few of my favorites, although I listened to many more:
“Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell — The author talks about the power behind our snap judgements — when our instinct just knows that something is off? Why is that? It turns out that a lot happens in our unconscious, and it’s virtually impossible for us to realize it. Gladwell discusses the implications of snap judgements made in a blink, citing examples of a (likely) billion dollar mistake by The Getty (a museum in Los Angeles) and the quick actions between police officers and neighbors at midnight, leading to headlines we read all too often. Would definitely recommend.
Talk by Ray Dalio, Co-Chief Investment Officer at Bridgewater Associates and author of Principles at the Stanford Graduate School of Business — I haven’t gotten the chance to read Ray Dalio’s book yet, but am hoping to in the near future. It was extremely insightful to hear about the environment he created at his company — allowing for a space where disagreement invokes curiosity and conversation as opposed to antagonism with competition between egos. Even as technological advancements allow us to accelerate growth in every field, it is humans behind the teams that make such technological advancements. As Malcolm Gladwell put it himself, “if you go back and look at people’s projections of the future from 10, 20, 30 years ago,…they’re often way too conservative in their estimations of technological change, and way too optimistic about our ability to bring about world peace”. If society was able to replicate the “growth mindset” or “growth environment” that allowed Bridgewater Associates to become the world’s largest hedge fund, then perhaps we could unlock so much more potential that is yet to be discovered.
TKS Talk — Human Interface Design with Cyrus Irani, a design producer at Apple — Cyrus Irani gave a very motivational talk on how he was able to combine his interests into a field he really enjoyed (eventually leading him to Apple) when he was on the verge of dropping out of college. To me, it’s extremely fascinating to think about how humans think and what we can do from a design perspective to invoke certain emotions — or maybe even from the perspective directly from our brain waves! Brain computer interfaces, or BCI’s, which are interfaces connected directly to our brain to can cause the computer to react in a certain way (e.g. when brain wave sensors detect stress, your video game screen gets blurrier and intense music starts to play), have the ability to augment virtual reality and the ability of tech to invoke certain emotions.
Finally, I immersed myself in UI/UX design and machine learning. Although I already had some background knowledge in these fields, it was cool to be able to spend more time immersing myself with them.
So yayyy, that was my extremely productive week! Everything I did was extremely rewarding, as I made sure that if I was to immerse myself in topics, it would help spark my curiosity and creativity. Hoping that I’ll be able to carry some of that momentum through December (isn’t it crazy that there are only FIVE weeks left of the year)???!!!
Good luck to everyone in making it through the rest of the year!
